


Harder Than Easy

by lovetincture



Series: Way Down in the Everyone Gets There [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Cannibalism, Caretaking, Dark Will Graham, Dubious Psychiatry, Eating Disorders, M/M, Mental Instability, Murder Husbands, Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 12:37:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20471165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Will doesn’t sleep because he can’t. The bruised and bloody things in his head press too heavily on him when he tries. He spends hours trying to push back the night through sheer force of will. He bargains with the sun, offers it bits and pieces of him. Shards of bone, bits of flesh. His body only; he never offers his mind. Even he knows it isn’t good for much these days.Will is not okay. Neither is Hannibal.





	Harder Than Easy

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly don't know what to say about this fic, but I feel like I should say something. It's set in the unhappiest 'verse I've ever written, a place I felt the need to revisit it without quite knowing why. This one was hard to write, and I feel like I'm still trying to nurse my heart through the aftermath. Take care of yourselves out there. 💙
> 
> _Sing me a love song, I'm your man._   
_I will always love you the best I can._   


Will doesn’t have much of a schedule. He sleeps when he’s tired and rises when he’s—no, that’s not right. That’s not his story. That’s some other Will’s story, a happier one in a happier time. It would be best for Will to say he doesn’t begrudge that one his happiness, but it would be a lie. Will hates him for it, or he would. Would hate him if he was real, but he’s not.

He feels a pang of triumph at that. Will isn’t terribly good at real/unreal these days. It feels good when he gets it right.

Will doesn’t sleep because he can’t. The bruised and bloody things in his head press too heavily on him when he tries. So many killers, so many dreams. So many voices that aren’t his own. He loses the thread of who he is anymore. Some days it’s so hard to find it again.

He’s mostly stopped trying. He fights going to bed like it’s trying to kill him, spends hours each day trying to push back the night through sheer force of will. He bargains with the sun, offers it bits and pieces of him. Shards of bone, bits of flesh. His body only; he never offers his mind. Even he knows it isn’t good for much these days. It isn’t— _ he _ isn’t—

It’s not like it used to be.

The sun never takes him up on it. This never gets less disappointing.

Hannibal coaxes him into bed sometimes when he’s gone too many days without closing his eyes. He used to find comfort in Hannibal’s arms, he thinks, or maybe it was that other Will who did it. Someone did. Someone found refuge and safety and didn’t need to bargain with the light.

Now the cradle of his arms feels like a cage more often than not. All of Will’s bones are too close to the surface, and they scrape along the soft valleys of Hannibal’s flesh. They bruise him. 

(Do they? Which him? He’s starting to lose track.)

Will doesn’t eat because he forgets.

No.

He doesn’t eat because he can’t stand the feel of it anymore. Bites of food feel like spiders creeping along his teeth, scratching his esophagus with pinprick legs while they devour him from within.

It’s not real. It’s probably not real. He can’t stand it anyway. The only thing he eats anymore is the meat from their kills. He isn’t _ stupid. _His brain may be rotting from the inside out, but he knows he’s suffering from malnutrition. He’s not a doctor, but he knows about scurvy, osteoporosis—the fact that his body will soon begin to eat away at his muscles, and his heart is a muscle.

He jokes to Hannibal that he should have eaten Will’s brain when he still had the chance, and Hannibal doesn’t find it funny.

His teeth are starting to grow loose, wiggling in their sockets. Only the spidersilk keeps them in place.

Hannibal doesn’t know about the spiders. He cooks their meat so carefully, stewing it until it’s soft enough to not make Will’s gums bleed. Their freezer is always full, except when it isn’t. There was that time in Maine when they couldn’t hunt for months, when Will had grown too careless and the cops were sniffing around. 

An empty freezer means Will won’t eat at all, no matter how Hannibal coaxes. He’s woken up to an IV line in his arm more than once. He always rips it out.

Hannibal threatens to intubate him, and Will bares his teeth in a skeletal snarl.

He never makes good on his threat, and Will never has to find out if he could have taken one of Hannibal’s fingers off if he tried. Hannibal leaves for two days and comes back with a woman taped hand and foot. Her mascara streaks black over her cheeks, like tributaries that have dried in a drought.

She recognizes Will; sometimes they do. There were months when their faces were plastered all over every newspaper and television. Her eyes widen and her breath quickens.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay.” She believes him, and it makes him smile. Sometimes they do. Ex-FBI carries a lot of weight, a lot of trust despite everything. It shouldn’t, but it does. Will touches her shoulder. “If I kill you, you can become a ghost. You can be Abigail’s friend.”

She starts sobbing then. She shakes her head and cries, and he worries she won’t be able to breathe with silver tape shining over her mouth. Worries she’ll hurt her neck with the way she jerks.

“Let her go,” he tells Hannibal. He knows without looking that Hannibal will. In these moments, Hannibal will do whatever Will asks. 

The woman freezes. She isn’t sure how to feel, he knows. Will could tell her. It might help. She’s scared of Hannibal, but she should be more scared of him.

“Hold still a moment,” Hannibal says, perfectly polite. “This knife is very sharp, and you’ll be hurt if you struggle.”

Hannibal scores the duct tape where it’s holding her tight, wrapped around her flesh so that skin bulges from the sides. She doesn’t hit or kick when Hannibal bends down to cut her ankles free, and Will is almost disappointed. Hannibal steps back to give her space, to give her space from at least one of the predators in the room, and she comes to life, rubbing at the places the duct tape let her skin red and sore.

“Take a moment,” Will says gently. He smiles, and she shrinks back. “We’ll wait until you can feel your limbs again. Those looked tight.”

Hannibal brings her a cup of water, and she whispers, “Thank you.”

She’s polite. Will loves it when they’re polite because Hannibal doesn’t. He grins wider.

She mostly looks at the floor to avoid looking at either Will or Hannibal, but Will can see it all the same, the expression on her face resolving into something so delicate and fragile. Something that looks an awful lot like hope.

It looks nice.

Will could tell her how she should feel, but she’ll figure it out in a little while. His mind is fuzzy at the edges, crowded with a dozen clamoring killers, but they feed him such good ideas. Right now they all say _ run. _

He likes it best when they run.

Will breathes in moonlight and picks up a knife.

* * *

In an ideal world, Hannibal would have started drugging Will months ago. He finds it distasteful, and he’d prefer not to taint the food, but he finds his principles have grown flexible. It’s entirely Will’s doing, and he can’t help but feel a rush of fondness. His brutal boy, cutting apart the world and reforming it to his specifications. Of course he’d do the same to Hannibal.

He loves Will in madness as well as sanity, but he is not willing to stand idly by while Will's mind destroys what he loves best. He would drug Will’s food, or his wine, but it’s a moot point because Will still won't eat.

He’s tried reasoning with Will, tried threatening him. Tried cooking the things he likes best and eventually settled on cooking the few things he'll still eat. None of it works. Will grows thinner and thinner, and Hannibal worries. Idle worry has begun to fit him like a tailored suit. It feels far too much like defeat, and it makes him feel murderous. He would wrest Will back from whichever God presumes to have a claim on him.

Will jerks his head up like a bloodhound when Hannibal gets home, puts a pin in whatever conversation he was having with the shades in his head. His hand taps out impatient patterns against the teak wood table.

“What’s in the bag?” Will asks, suspicious enough to speak to Hannibal. He rarely does, these days. His hand stills, and he looks at Hannibal as though he might bite.

The sudden attention burns through Hannibal like cordial. He tries not to dwell on how far he’s fallen, the ways he’s become a dog nosing for scraps at the table.

“Antipsychotics,” Hannibal says, taking one of the pill bottles out and setting it in front of Will. “I thought you might try them.”

Will’s lip curls in a sneer. “Why, Hannibal, you haven’t been my psychiatrist for years.”

_ I’ve been nothing but, _ Hannibal thinks but does not say.

“You haven’t offered me drugs before,” Will murmurs, growing soft and dangerous, the way Hannibal loves him best. “Why now?”

Will’s gaze is piercing and clear, fully lucid in a way Hannibal hasn’t seen in an age. It makes his breath catch in his throat and something hot and sharp prick at the corners of his eyes.

For once, he wants to lie. He wants to pretend to a better nature if it means Will will take the pills, but he can’t lie to Will—Will who sees straight through him, so he simply tells the truth.

“You were interesting and so beautiful in your madness.”

“But not anymore?”

Hannibal closes his eyes. Breathes in the scent of warm skin and sunlight, the dust motes skittering across the floor. The dishes drying in the rack, smelling faintly of bleach and the tinny orange of their dish soap.

“No, not anymore. Not for a long time.”

Will plucks the orange bottle off the table. He studies the label and twists it in the light before handing it back to Hannibal. “I don’t want them.”

_ “Mano meile, _ be reasonable.”

“No,” Will says. He turns back to his conversation, talking to ghosts and shutting Hannibal out, as if he weren’t there at all.

* * *

Once the pills are in his hand, Hannibal does think of grinding them to a fine powder, sprinkling them over Will’s food and making a sauce sweet enough to mask the bitter flavor. He has his hand on the mortar and pestle before he thinks better of it. There is one thing Will reliably eats, and he doesn’t want that to change.

His show of magnanimity doesn’t matter in practice. Will is suspicious of the meat for days. He lingers in the kitchen while Hannibal cooks, standing silent and watchful at his elbow. Hannibal enjoys it. He drinks in the company of a silent shadow at his side, even if Will keeps turning to look at things that aren’t there.

Hannibal returns to the pharmacy for a liquid suspension. It’s far too easy to hide pills under a tongue, to pocket them in the corner of a cheek. 

In the end he just knocks Will out—sits on his chest in the middle of the night and pins his flailing arms with his knees. He holds a pillow to Will’s face, mindful of sharp and gnashing teeth. Will is so light these days that it’s easier than it should be, and it makes Hannibal frown. 

When Will goes slack, he removes the pillow carefully, waiting to be sure it’s not a trick. Will doesn’t move when Hannibal strokes a hand along his cheek, not even when Hannibal presses his nose to Will’s hair to breathe him in. He’s so sharp in his arms, all bones and hard edges. He smells like their shampoo and beneath it the sweet smell of rot. The scent of his body cannibalizing itself for fuel.

He cradles Will as long as he dares before easing him down gently. He binds Will’s wrists and ankles with the cuffs he’d had made. They’re leather lined with velvet, soft to the touch in a deep midnight blue that brings out the light in Will’s eyes. He pulls the cuffs snug and slips a finger underneath to make sure they aren’t too tight, that they won’t cut off circulation.

Once he’s satisfied with his work, he lies down beside Will and waits for him to wake. With Will’s arm beneath his head, it almost feels like being held.

Hannibal feels the moment tension returns to Will’s limbs, the moment he goes from soft and pliant to rigid and snarling. He doesn’t wake up by degrees but rather all at once. He comes up swinging, fighting and clawing against the slack of the rope, and Hannibal feels a swell of pride.

“Hannibal, what the _ fuck. _ Let me go.”

“No,” Hannibal says.

He sits back at the foot of the bed, out of reach of Will’s thrashing. Will curses and fights, flailing and kicking until he finally tires himself out. Hannibal tries not to worry about the expenditure of calories that Will doesn’t have to spare.

He touches Will’s ankle and does not react when Will flinches away.

“Don’t bite me,” Hannibal says.

“Or what?”

Hannibal cocks his head. “Or nothing, but I would prefer that you didn’t.”

Will grumbles as Hannibal shakes up the bottle and measures out a dose in the dropper, but he doesn’t bite. Hannibal squirts the bitter liquid into his mouth, aiming for his throat, and holds his mouth shut when he’s done.

“Swallow,” he says.

Will meets his eyes with a defiant glare. He holds out for long minutes, but Hannibal is patient. Besides, enough of the medication will absorb through the lining of his mouth whether he decides to swallow or not.

In the end, he does. Hannibal feeds him cool water from a plastic cup and lets out the breath he was holding. They will do this for six weeks.

* * *

“Why are you trying to poison me?” Will sobs one night, voice gone soft and broken.

Hannibal says nothing. He hums a nursery song he half remembers, something unearthed from a moth-eaten room in his memory palace. Something mired in rot that he pulled from the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> If I've made you terribly sad, come say hi on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture), and I'll give you digital hugs. I also write [original work](http://hopezane.com) if you want to find me elsewhere.


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